Agile Manufacturing Enables Transformation

A recent September 2007 Gartner study titled “Building Agile Manufacturing That Enables Transformation” made several great points:

1. Changing forces in market, customer expectations and technology demand more agility and quickness in business processes.

2.  Using a ”myths” leading to “misses” discussion they challenge people to look outside their environment for innovations saying that people and companies tend to “lock in” to solutions because of tradition and inability to search outside their four walls.

3. ”Chaos-tolerant” business processes are what is needed in the future. Using a technique called capable-to-promise as an example of chaos-tolerant business processes, they say that future technology will enable them.

Capable-to-promise is basically the ability to quickly determine if a customer order is doable by considering both material and capacity constraints simultaneously.

My one disagreement is with the point that chaos-tolerant business processes require whiz bang technology. My experience with a solution in the on-time shipment area reveals that the innovation lies in it’s simplicity, not it’s technology; plus it has the ability to transform information already in current systems to drastically increase the productivity of knowledge workers like planners and master schedulers. It’s lack of whiz bang is what makes this solution so easy to evaluate and implement. The proven value of 20-30% throughput and inventory improvements by eliminating data collection and expediting activities in short-term prioritization efforts is chaos-tolerance at it’s best. 

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